Animal groups

Melanie is reading an interesting book at the moment, The Future Eaters, by Tim Flannery
(for sale in our book store). In it Flannery talks about the ancient flora
and fauna of Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding islands, his ultimate goal being to show that man has been
causing mass extinctions for many thousands of years. One group of fauna that is frequently mentioned in
discussions of Oz (Flannery's book included), is the marsupials. Where did that word come from?

Marsupial is a relatively recent word, but it was not originally used to describe a type
of animal. The earliest written use of the word was to describe the "marsupeal muscle", a muscle
in the thigh. That muscle was named thus because it resembled a pouch, and that is etymologically what marsupial
means: "characterized by having a pouch". It derives from Latin marsupium,
"pouch", which
Latin apparently borrowed from Greek marsippion, diminutive of marsyppos "pouch". Marsupiale
was the form that was first used zoologically, and it referred to the opossum.

So if marsupials are pouched
mammals, what are mammals? English borrowed mammal
from Latin Mammalia "the class of mammals", in the early 19th century. Mammalia
came ultimately from Latin mamma "breast", which is so named because mothers have the breasts
by which babies are suckled. And mothers are so named (mamma) because ma ma are some of the first
syllables that babies utter (da da being the the others). So,
quite simply , mammals are the animals who
suckle their young. Related by meaning is mastodon, which
literally means "nipple teeth". A French scientist who
examined fossils of these large, hairy and extinct elephants observed
that the protrusions on its teeth were "nipple-shaped". [Did
we mention that he was French?]

Now we move (or should we say
"creep"?) to the reptiles. For it is their method of movement
which gave them their
name. To the Romans, anything which crept or crawled was reptilis,
an adjective formed from repere "to crawl, or creep".
In other words, reptile means "creepy-crawly". Its
modern usage is much more specific and no longer includes worms, slugs
and insects, as it did in Latin.

The etymology of bird has flown away with the birds, for
it can only be taken back to Old English brid (yes, an example of metathesis), which originally referred
to young birds. There are no known cognates in any other Germanic languages.

What about fish? This is a very old and venerable world which goes back to Old English and
beyond. In Old English it was fisc. The Germanic cognates are all very similar: Old Frisian,
Old Saxon and Old High German fisc, Middle Dutch visc, Old Icelandic fiskr and Gothic fisks.
Interestingly, Robert K. Barnhart suggests that these nouns developed from the verbs in each language that
meant "to catch fish" - so catching fish had a name before the objects of the catching! The
Latin cognate is, of course, piscis, suggesting an Indo-European root of *peisk-, though the Greek
ikhthus is not related.

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